Hi everybody this is God's ad. Hope you're off to a good week. I want to take a few

minutes to hopefully close the parentheses on a triggering event last week, one that broke all the records on my social media.

So as some of you know who follow my work, it's been many many many years that I've been discussing

parasitic ideas idea pathogens all of the mechanisms and ideological

bends that are removing us from reason, common sense, logic, science,

evidence-based thinking, which led of course to this book.

So last week I posted a set of tweets that I thought were really

innocuous and if anything they were meant to highlight the importance of being kind, but with some nuance.

And so I'd like to repeat the gist of what I had said.

So I basically said that my wife came up to me after we were at a cafe and she came up to me and said that, you know, she was interacting with a barista and in the interaction the barista was clearly

potentially transgender it's not clear and that she was

unsure how to address the individual and I then explained that it's because it was a new barista who was having a hard time with the I guess the register or the machine whatever

I'm not sure exactly which machine it was and so my wife they were all it was a very warm interaction my wife turned to the

colleague of the new barista and she wanted to say, you know, he'll

get the hang of it and she wasn't sure whether she should say he'll get the hang of it or

they and then she even told me that she wasn't

sure if she should use they because what if he's not transgender and he actually is a

male who jest is just so she just came up to me to say you, she was very concerned that she didn't want to make a Fopa.

So you would think this is something very nice. It's laudable. She's kind. She's sensitive.

She's exactly what the pronoun Taliban want us to be which is kind and respectful and then I added to that

basically these kinds of you know thought crimes or or linguistic crimes and you know

making sure that everybody says the right thing and so on is is misplaced energy

...